


Extra Credit

by EntreNous



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Crush, F/F, One-Sided Relationship, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-04-21
Updated: 2005-04-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 23:36:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EntreNous/pseuds/EntreNous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She wasn’t exactly sure when she’d started calling Ms. Calendar Jenny in her head."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Extra Credit

**Author's Note:**

> Not so much a strict pairing fic, but more Willow's gentle crush on Jenny Calendar, and the start of Willow noticing women more. Written for moosesal.

“That was the weirdest,” Xander said as he stuffed his jacket into his locker and caught a stack of falling dog-eared TNG novels just before they hit him on the head. “I mean, demon possession, sure, that usually beats out other types of oddness. But how things went down on Saturday . . .”

Willow nodded solemnly. “I know! With us finding out about Giles’ past, and figuring out that he and Ethan used to be friends. And then! Saving Buffy at the last minute, when Angel--”

“No,” Xander interrupted her. “Weird that for a review session that had two, count ‘em, two students, Ms. Calendar needed you for a co-pilot to steer us through the troubled waters of basic programming.”

“But I’m good with computers,” Willow said, bewildered. “Plus, I’ve thought that I might want to teach, so that’s a reason. And it was really nice of Ms. Calendar to ask me, because . . . of the extra-credit,” she finished weakly. 

Xander laughed. “And you would be needing extra credit . . . to get an A plus _plus_?”

She opened her mouth to respond but he slammed the locker door shut and kept on talking. “Look, I know I’m not the greatest at math, but a two-to-two teacher student ratio . . . No way can we let that become a trend.”

“Uh, that’d be a one-to-one ratio,” Willow clarified.

Xander groaned and hoisted his bag back up his shoulder. “One-to-one, that’s even worse.” Then he brightened considerably. “Well, I guess it could be okay -- if all the teachers looked like Ms. Calendar.”

* * *

Of course, almost none of the other teachers looked anything like Ms. Calendar. 

Jenny Calendar was one of the younger teachers at Sunnydale High, definitely the coolest one (though Willow loyally added a little footnote in her head that clarified that Giles was of course the coolest _man_ at the school). But Jenny was kind of . . . hip, and funky, and other words that Willow’s mom used that sounded all wrong when someone was trying to capture and catalogue a presence that made people stop and stare and catch their breath a little. 

Willow didn’t need Xander to figure that part out, that Ms. Calendar was something special to look at. Not that she sat around thinking about which girls -- which women -- were worth looking at. When she stopped to think about it, she was sure that if she could have helped it, she wouldn’t have looked at Ms. Calendar at all. Well, except in ways that made giving the right answers to classroom questions possible. 

But watching Xander surreptitiously -- and that was part of daily behavior, like her habit of casting glances at her wrist to check her watch, or Giles’ habit of clearing his throat when they needed to get the conversation back on track, or Buffy’s habit of stroking the stake hidden in her shoulder bag pretty much all of the time -- watching Xander sometimes meant watching Xander watch Jenny. 

* * *

On the rare occasions when Jenny was wearing a short-ish skirt and bending forward over students who sat in front of them, pointing out glitches on their screens, Willow would track Xander’s gaze starting at their teacher’s ankles, skimming upward on her sleek calves, on to her thighs moving against each other (making a soft shushing sound when Ms. Calendar shifted while she explained how to fix the errors). All the way up, until his eyes were lingering where hem stopped and a darkened area lay beyond, uncertain space more than substance.

And then there was Jenny with her hand on Xander’s shoulder, talking about program coding and slowly explaining the first five steps of the exercise for the nth time, while Xander’s glazed eyes, almost against his will, were drawn to the shadowy dip of her v-neck. Funny that Ms. Calendar wore low cut clingy tops like that when none of the other teachers did. Not that her knit shirts weren’t pretty, because they were, or that they didn’t look nice on her, because they really did. Even though her breasts were sort of small, and that was . . . a weird thing to notice. 

Okay, not weird, because it was normal for teenagers to be curious about their bodies and compare themselves to others. She’d read that lots of places. 

Willow looked down at her own small breasts covered in a bulky loose sweater, a crew-neck with a funny monkey face stitched on the front of it. She’d bought it for herself once she had convinced her mom that she could handle the shopping on her own. But when she looked at Jenny’s clothes and Jenny’s shoes and . . . Jenny’s everything . . . well, she wasn’t so sure she could handle it.

* * *

Later, in study hall, she poked Xander gently in the arm with the tip of her eraser, and he jumped in his seat before turning around.

“Warn a guy next time, would you?” he hissed at her.

“That was the warning,” she whispered. “What did you mean, the weirdness, the ratio, the . . . what?”

“I don’t know,” he answered in a soft voice, tilting back in his chair towards her. She resisted the urge to reach out and steady him with her hands. “Just . . . brings the teacher’s pet thing to a whole new level. It’s like she’s trying to find excuses to hang with you. And a teacher wanting to be your pal --”

“I’m not Jenny’s pet,” she mouthed at him.

He raised his eyebrows. “ _Jenny_?” he mouthed back. 

* * *

She wasn’t exactly sure when she’d started calling Ms. Calendar Jenny in her head. Giles was really the only one to use that name -- not in her head of course, but out loud where all of them could hear, as though it was a name that anyone could think and say. Sure, often enough it seemed like he was more likely to revert to the formal title and last name instead of Jenny’s already nick-name-y real name. But when Giles did say “Jenny”, Willow liked to hear the way he pronounced it. Hesitantly but with a caress in his voice, drawing out the y on the end so that it sounded like a string of vowels overlapping and combining and vibrating together.

So maybe it was the way that Xander looked at Jenny made Willow look too. And definitely Giles looked at Jenny as though he was fascinated and intrigued by her, by the blue-black shine of her hair, by the dip and curve of her hip, jutted out as she stood with her arms crossed and laughed at him. 

But with Giles everything was always more about words -- words on the page, words of ritual hushed or shouted, words in flux and translation holding promise and power and portents. Probably then it was the way Giles talked to Jenny that Willow couldn’t get out of her head, that made her think that first name silently when Jenny was perched on the edge of her desk, smiling secretively at the sight of Willow sitting straight and expectant at her table while the other students were still milling about the computer lab. Unmistakable, the shift in register of the way Giles spoke to Jenny, signaling that she, like him, moved through their world of tests and tribulations and then moved past it, on towards some other level that Willow couldn’t reach or even glimpse yet, no matter how hard she tried.

It was the shift in register too in the way Giles heard Jenny differently than he did the rest of them. When he listened to her voice, her timber a little lower and much richer than Willow’s or any of the other girls she knew in high school, the joking and sharp comments sometimes seemed to frustrate him and sometimes seemed to charm him beyond the telling of it. As Willow hovered near the two of them, in the library, in the lab, the way they spoke and listened to one another edged open a door, a barely-obscured pathway to something complicated and confusing and exciting. Sometimes she tried to sit or stand very still, so that she might see and hear where they were headed more clearly. 

But she always said something, her voice straining into a high pitch, her tone darting quickly over a spectrum of notes, to interrupt helpfully, offer a thought or an idea that would set Giles off to his books and Jenny away to her computer, dissipating the electricity that had been nearly tangible in the air.

Willow cleared her throat, and tried to modulate her own voice, to cultivate an air of bemusement. 

* * *

Things were a little easier when Oz was around more. Even though Oz told Willow during one of their first conversations that he wasn’t much of a computer person, he had the potential to be a computer nerd, and that counted for a lot. It meant that he got what it was like to know things easily, even if he didn’t have much interest in knowing them. 

In a different time, in a different place, maybe he would even have been the one that Jenny would have chosen for a teacher’s pet, or have been the student that she asked to stay after and help with the other kids who had gotten behind on their assignments. 

Secretly, though, Willow was glad he wasn’t.

“You up for something after school?” he asked her one afternoon.

“What kind of something?” she asked.

“I hadn’t actually planned that part out yet,” Oz admitted. “I got up to asking you, and you answering, and then I figured the rest would take care of itself.”

“Could it be another day?” Willow asked hesitantly. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she rushed on. “Only because Ms. Calendar asked if I could stay after and help her set up the lab computers with this new program that the school bought, and, well, I kind of promised her already that I could.”

Oz smiled at her warmly. “Not a problem.”

“That’s . . . that’s great,” Willow said. She took a quick breath and then forged ahead. “Because there might be other times. Times when I might stay and help her. You know. For extra credit.”

“Sure,” Oz said. He paused for a beat. “She’s cool, Ms. Calendar.”

“She is cool,” Willow said, relieved. “She really, really is.”


End file.
